The Last Lion’ is first-rate history

Tuesday

Dec 11, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Liz Smith

‘Now the hour had come for him to mobilize the English language and send it into battle,” reported America’s grand reporter, Edward R. Murrow, speaking of the new Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the start of World War II.

Ladies and gentlemen readers, I want to follow this with a rather long quote from the beginning of the best-selling book, “The Last Lion,” by William Manchester and Paul Reid.

This is the massive end of Manchester’s long research into the life of Winston Spencer Churchill: 1940-1965. I paid about $40 for this specimen and for the life of me, can’t think why (but for expense) Little, Brown did not break it into two volumes. If you put it on an e-reader— you can handle it better. (But I am still buying print, hoping to help keep printed books alive.)

I am only at the beginning of this masterful work.

It opens with a description of Winston’s work and play habits, his incredible energy, his consumption of incredible amounts of food and drink and his imperiously demanding “a bath” in unusual circumstances. This all coincides with his “costumes” and the treatment of helpers, and his inspired confidence in the people of the British Empire.

This beginning description would all be funny and amusing were it not for the tragedy of the war at his heels. But I liked so much the following excerpt that I want to tease you into the entire book:

“After reading Plato and Aristotle as a young man, Churchill declared for agnosticism ... although he embraced the Greek’s philosophical antecedents of Christianity, he found no intellectual reward in theological exercises. He subscribed to the Christian values of mercy and forgiveness.

“He ... concluded that the greatness and goodness of the past could be recaptured through the exercise of will. God would play no part in the saga because if God, indeed if there was a God, was unwitting or unable to intervene. ... Yet that paradigm left open the possibility that a force of evil — such as Hitler — might well impose his will on the future ... he intended to deny Hitler his supposed destiny. ... Churchill, not God, would safeguard the future of Europe and the British Empire, and he would do so by the vigorous exercise of his imagination and the imposition of his will by the only means he knew — action, action this day, action every day.”

This precedes the German blitzkrieg and the stranding of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. With the feeble attempt of France to hold back the Nazis, the world watched holding its breath.